Veterans

James Rhodes: From the inception of this great nation, deceased veterans have been revered as fallen heroes while, on the other hand, living veterans, in many cases, have been shortchanged and discounted.

Charles Hayes: The movie shows how hard combat is on service members and their families. Seldom do we acknowledge in this country how so many men and women sacrifice so much for so little acknowledgment or reward.

John LaForge: With sexual violence, endless wars of occupation, fatalities, brain trauma, permanent disabilities and an epidemic of suicides, what military recruiters are selling these days looks like a lot like a bad horror show.

Jerry Lembcke: The scenes imagined by Dowd of antiwar-movement hostility to returning G.I.s took root during the 1970s as a political antidote to the uncomfortable truth that activists recruited veterans to their ranks, and thousands of returnees joined the war to end the war.

Larry Wines: Despite the events of our time and how we feel about each of them, it remains important, even vital, that we take a day to honor our veterans for putting aside their own lives and entering an environment where personal desires, goals and ambitions are in second-place — often, a distant second-place — to the needs and requirements of military service.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: Although most war memorials throughout the United States are open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York ‘closes’ at 10 pm, that is, if you are expressing First Amendment rights.

Murray Polner: “Legless Veteran” was aimed at three targets: The U.S. Government, opportunistic and scurrilous profiteers of an anti-Red crusade gone mad, and the Communist Party, perhaps because of the longstanding hostility between Stalin and Trotsky.

Ken Olsen: At a time when veterans are dying in the nation’s streets in greater numbers than they died at war in Iraq or Afghanistan, VA is not only turning its back on mentally disabled veterans in Los Angeles but actively punishing them.

Murray Polner: Our inevitable future wars will cost far more. And those who serve will learn, just as Vietnam vets learned, that those who send them to war will never be as bighearted as they were to WWII and Korean vets.

The Body Politic

Dave Zirin: She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.